ExtJS vs. AngularJS

I’ve been meaning to say a few words about this for a long time: stop comparing ExtJS to AngularJS!

It’s like comparing a car to a tire:

• One is not better than the other; it’s an invalid comparison
• If you need a car, you probably shouldn’t buy just the tire
• If you need just a tire, you probably shouldn’t buy an entire car

Consider this: minified version of ExtJS 4.2.2 is 1.4 MB (ext-all.js) and that’s not counting all the CSS and resources. By contrast, AngularJS 1.2.13 is just over 100 KB.

Now when I’m calling AngularJS a “tire” what I mean is that if you are building an app of any magnitude, you will probably be bundling it with some other libraries. I’m guessing many newer apps will have a bare minimum of AngularJS + jQuery + Bootstrap.

So, when would I chose one over the other, if I were equally proficient in both?

1. If an important objective is fast page load times (i.e. landing page), I would go with a lean stack on top of AngularJS
2. However, if I’m building an enterprise portal with a ton of UI and functionality, I would probably go with ExtJS
3. Now how about both? I’ve built apps that had a lean landing page with just jQuery that would then transition to the “app” in ExtJS; I think LastPass is an excellent example of that.